Tips and Tricks from a Black Marketeer

[ModdedNostalgia]

- First BIG ONE: Capture merchants and put them to work in a base even though it's illegal; you can use them for their intended purpose without having to go to a settlement to buy/sell, saving you precious time. They will not work on your team; they MUST be AT WORK in a base! Definitely capture all of the north desert merchants as one of them sells all the AMMO you'll ever need, and the others offer decent pals and food. May you never run out of High-Quality Pal oil ever again, and may all of your Pals work more efficient on an infinite salad resource!

- Turn off degradation of parts outside of bases on single-player if your computer can handle it. Setting up dope little campsites just to sleep in when night hits can be useful as heck but also it makes moving bases around a lot easier - especially if you ever want to return to a base site to use it again. Not to mention setting up torches along pathways and preparing your base for a raid by setting up overkill amounts of landmine strips...

- We all know the big base area in the middle of the map with Coal and Ore right? The "one base you'll ever need"? You should know about it by know; there are like 20 YouTube vids on it at this point. Set up a ranch there and you'll never really need another resource base. If you want one for sulfur, that's on you, but it's not worth it considering later tips.

- Grappling gun movement ignores carry-weight. If you've been trudging around your base with 10K lbs and hating your life, maybe whip out that grappling gun and just point to the ground next to the chest you're trying to go to. :D Make walls around your base to quickly move around and clear up thousands of pounds of crap in an instant! You won't need transporting Pals where we're going.

- On that note with the grappling hook: If you farm up Lightning Strike from skill fruit trees (not bolt lol) and teach it to an Astregon (capturing the alpha is annoying; go to Sanctuary No. 3 up north-east of the desert and capture some awesome rare pals there instead), it can quickly mine up all that Sulfur next to the Volcano tower. There are a couple more spots around the volcano area, but you'd rather have to set up bases or grapple a long distance, and that's painful. Again, if you have the part-degradation setting I mentioned earlier turned off, then you can just set up some easy spaced-out surfaces to grapple to after you're done mining to make the trip even easier.

- Certain flying mounts can actually lift you while over-encumbered and traverse higher terrain bumps (even some ground mounts have better ground traversal than the player); this can be helpful if stuck on terrain and need to "jump".

- Speed-catching pals on a mount is one of the fastest ways to power-level; just drive-by them in the back and hope for a catch, but just keep running; no need to fight. Sell them and their drops to some merchants to get more spheres and repeat the process. The EXP bonuses for catching multiple of the same Pal add up quick - don't ignore it.

- If you make a baby Jetragon, it won't be an alpha. Which means it can actually touch the ground when it lands... Which makes it the best Pal to farm pal fluid, wool, and other low-level stuff because it can "squash" other smaller Pals (like Pengullet, Fuack, Lamball, etc.) when sprinting (must be touching ground; alpha Pals have an issue where their hitboxes don't touch the ground when traversing in this manner). All you need to do is go down to one of the beginning beaches/islands and speed into those low-level Pals. You'll instantly pick up rewards without a fight. You will need to breed two Jetragons to do this though, and unfortunately the only way to get them initially is to capture a male and female alpha. Good luck!

- Butchering Pals is only for the meme unless performing the mount-glitch or killing off bad breeding results from legendaries such as Jetragon or Frostallion for their loot; you get the same drops from capturing the Pal or killing it out in the wild; why waste a captured Pal on a bit extra drops (unless you gotta wait an hour for it to respawn)? Just a waste. There are all kinds of other ways to get rid of Pals besides butchering them if you are trying to be humane at all with all of that potential - my main preferred method is sacrificing them to make one stronger using the Pal Essence Condenser, but if you really need more Pal space and don't want to kill, boy do I have a solution for you:

- Pal Display Cages can hold a massive amount of Pals and doesn't matter what size; you can just cram em in there by the dozens! Great for storage or when you're trying to condense a bunch of the same Pal you've been breeding up into one big one and don't want them crowding your Palbox. Might make your computer burn in hell though... ;) You might make a designated base for Pal storage...

- Mark dungeons, fruit trees, and weird merchant locations on your map; especially the latter if you want easier base merchants than capturing the ones in settlements... Also mark nearby ore nodes next to your bases to make resource runs brain-free. If you find an area with a bunch of treasure chests, make sure to mark it as well as chests do respawn!

- Mark all chests you find in the Astral Mountains in particular; the higher level ones require gold keys but often result in some incredible drops!

- Jam-filled buns are the simplest craft-able food and they last a long time and fill you decently - one hour without refrigeration and one will fill about 80% of your hunger, making player hunger almost completely disregardable if you have a feed bag. This makes them easy as hell to have as a bulk supply of food when you aren't running salad at a later level for better efficiency. Just need flour and berries. Shove em in a refrigerator with a Cryolinx or other high-level freeziboi that won't get too distracted assigned when you ain't usin' 'em and you'll be set.

- If you set up an extra feed basket for your freezer guy and put some food in there for him, also making sure to keep your refrigerator well-spaced away from your farm area, they won't go very far to eat. Which means they are more likely to stay on-task. They don't usually go to bed in a bed unless away from camp (often just staying asleep near the fridge instead), but putting a bed near their workspace may further ensure they stay at task even when away from camp - though I have seen multiple instances of a random Pal stealing the bed instead.

- The Legendary Schematics for all gear can be found by capturing and then butchering Alpha bosses (you get two chances at the drops that way). Definitely read some article on that one for more info because there's a lot of legendary gear, and I'm not keen on going over it all. But more importantly, if you did the chest thing in the Astral Mountains I mentioned earlier, then you should come across some great accessories to deal with the heat and cold anyway, so you should be set with just one type of Legendary Pal Metal armor. I like how the cold armor looks with my character, so I went with cold.

Good luck out there! Hope you die a few times figuring crap out!

[Raven]

Some really nice tips...For me, I use the scatter sphere bazooka which ultimately can wind up hitting collateral cultists when I'm trying to dash by and grab whatever pals. I find that's a good time to use the butcher ability :P

[ModdedNostalgia]

Originally posted by Raven:

Some really nice tips...For me, I use the scatter sphere bazooka which ultimately can wind up hitting collateral cultists when I'm trying to dash by and grab whatever pals. I find that's a good time to use the butcher ability :P

Use Homing Launcher and count your targets (then just generally click that many times aimed in their direction); scatter launcher is so wasteful - especially with later-game spheres. If you are truly itching to catch, keep your assault rifle handy to pop a headshot or two in before the catch. I'd honestly rather throw my spheres by hand than use a scatter launcher lol but that's just me. Unless you are playing with the creature density maxed-out, I see little reason for using it.

[Raven]

Originally posted by ModdedNostalgia:

Use Homing Launcher and count your targets (then just generally click that many times aimed in their direction); scatter launcher is so wasteful - especially with later-game spheres. If you are truly itching to catch, keep your assault rifle handy to pop a headshot or two in before the catch. I'd honestly rather throw my spheres by hand than use a scatter launcher lol but that's just me. Unless you are playing with the creature density maxed-out, I see little reason for using it.

Actually I am ^_^;; I only tend to turn it off when I'm hunting any alpha/boss over level 40...or when the world starts getting wonky. They say "This setting affects performance" but that's not exactly right. What actually happens is things just bug the heck out. I've fallen part way into the world only one time on regular settings, I fell through the world 3 times today alone and on top of that there is a lot of pals that spawn under the floor or even worse, when I can *HEAR* a shiny, but I can't actually get to it because after really narrowing down the sound cues...it spawned inside a rock.

[ModdedNostalgia]

Originally posted by Raven:

Originally posted by ModdedNostalgia:

Use Homing Launcher and count your targets (then just generally click that many times aimed in their direction); scatter launcher is so wasteful - especially with later-game spheres. If you are truly itching to catch, keep your assault rifle handy to pop a headshot or two in before the catch. I'd honestly rather throw my spheres by hand than use a scatter launcher lol but that's just me. Unless you are playing with the creature density maxed-out, I see little reason for using it.

Actually I am ^_^;; I only tend to turn it off when I'm hunting any alpha/boss over level 40...or when the world starts getting wonky. They say "This setting affects performance" but that's not exactly right. What actually happens is things just bug the heck out. I've fallen part way into the world only one time on regular settings, I fell through the world 3 times today alone and on top of that there is a lot of pals that spawn under the floor or even worse, when I can *HEAR* a shiny, but I can't actually get to it because after really narrowing down the sound cues...it spawned inside a rock.

1.9 is my favorite setting - boost spawns by a substantial amount without affecting overworld boss spawns and I don't often experience the glitches you are experiencing. But it's definitely not dense enough to justify using a scatter launcher with those settings lol - probably why I prefer the homing launcher. Spawn points respawn more Pals when outside of their view range, so it really just comes down to having a decently-fast mount to shoot from and a good farming route for me. Shadowbeak, Fenglope, Paldius/Necromus, or Frostallion are all good options for this.

For getting back through the floor when I fall through, I like to have an Alpha flying mount with me. Then I just fly up to a point where I can land, get off, and walk around - my head should be touching the floor I need to go through. Then I just mount my mount again and it pushes me up through the floor and back to freedom. I simply dismount then and return my stuck Pal back to its sphere and I continue on.

[these people]

I didn't even think of using the Display Cages as extra Pal storage! That is actually a great solution to the frustration of constantly filling up my Pal box. I'd mostly been condensing or selling Pals (or butchering my reject Anubises for the souls)

[ModdedNostalgia]

Originally posted by these people:

I didn't even think of using the Display Cages as extra Pal storage! That is actually a great solution to the frustration of constantly filling up my Pal box. I'd mostly been condensing or selling Pals (or butchering my reject Anubises for the souls)

Yeee - remember to vertically stack them for optimal space; they have a weird barrier that goes much higher than the box is (probably to accomodate such Pals as Astegon and Jormuntide as Alphas), so be aware of that.. You have to build about 5-6 walls high (I just went with 6 because it's even) to vertically stack em, but you can get about 20 walls high before your base "ends". However, I've actually noticed no issue building even higher than that if you have structure deterioration turned off; it even still recognizes the area as a base even though it isn't, and power from the base will still go there, so I use that space in one of my bases!